


Over the Styx

by Bryn Lantry (Bryn)



Category: Blake's 7
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 1993-01-01
Updated: 1993-01-01
Packaged: 2017-12-04 04:07:16
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,920
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/706356
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bryn/pseuds/Bryn%20Lantry
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>On the London, Avon is spoilt for choice between the devil and the deep blue sea: Travis and Blake.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Over the Styx

**Author's Note:**

> Part One. There wasn't a part two. This is a couple of scenes, to set up a story on Cygnus Alpha.
> 
> Printed in The Other Side #9, 1993

#  
#

As I was newly dead, and sat beside  
My corpse, looking on it, as one who muses  
Gazing upon a house he was burnt out of...

Beddoes, Death's Jest-Book

#

#

Eight ghosts populated the waste of Blake's dream. They didn't rebuke him, only meandered with drugged faces and hands cold as antimatter.  
  
Goose-fleshed, Blake jolted awake. He groped for his shirt, whose elbows were threadbare after four months of leaning earnestly on them, conspiring revolt. To Commander Leylan he'd pledged they'd be no more revolting.  
  
Forbidding a yawn, Blake focused shapes from the orangey gloom of the London's night. A pathetic sight. Sterile slabs and the prisoners on them mind-erased in sleep, or jerking themselves off, or gibbering in the phantasmagoria of the damned. Blake pitied every one of them.  
  
He climbed down from his third storey bunk, past Jenna, whose hand trysted with the craftily smuggled knife under her pillow, and Vila with Olag Gan, whose affection defied the narrowness of convict berths. Wanting a glimpse of the stars, he walked through to the flight compartment. Or the crocodile waters, as Arco, who had a streak of bar poetry, had nicknamed this section, in awe of the embezzler who often skulked here.  
  
The crocodile was at home. In the murkiness Blake noticed him first, because his profile was edged by a comet's tail. An odd enough profile. Eyes always in gothic shadow, thrown by the ridge of bone above and the heavy bridge of his nose. The nose Blake blamed on a cubist, being chunky and wonky but flat of nostril.  
  
Futilely, the man was poring over a scrap of paper by cometlight. Sensing intrusion, he snapped up a reptilian gaze to repulse it.  
  
“Kerr Avon,” greeted Blake, inquisitive.  
  
“General Last-Ditch,” he returned. That was one of Arco's epithets for Blake.  
  
“Can't sleep?”  
  
“It's called insomnia. One contracts it when the brain whirs on tediously. Having misplaced most of yours, you wouldn't know the problem.”  
  
Snapdragon, thought Blake. But that was a flower, wasn't it?  
  
“Besides,” added Avon, “the air in here has less taint of masculine breath.”  
  
Coming to the porthole, Blake nodded out. “Funny things, stars. They look cold sober from a distance. In fact they're seismic.”  
  
“I prefer looking at the emptiness between.”  
  
“To remind you of freedom?”  
  
“Of obscurity,” droned Avon, “and obliteration. The only two laws of the universe.”  
  
Disturbed, Blake glanced at him. This criminal had eyes which were nothing short of dire. “Well, yesterday you missed out on obliteration.”  
  
“Fishing for gratitude, Blake?”  
  
“Not me. Thank Leylan's decency. He waived his right to execute.”  
  
Avon looked wry. “Still your doing. I have a theory that the commander was an admirer of the cult anti-classist you were in your glory years. He's absurdly tolerant of your misdemeanours. Probably he listened to your pirate transmissions.”  
  
“Did you listen, Avon?”  
  
“Why would I?”  
  
“The spirit of inquiry.”  
  
“Actually, you've an unmistakable voice. Except the Welsh accent was rampant then, as if never tamed by Federation schooling. Another queer protest against centralism and homogeneity.”  
  
“You seem acquainted with Freedom Party tenets, Avon.”  
  
“Are you?” he asked ironically.  
  
“No. As you kindly reminded me, I've no true existence prior to Bran Foster's reawakening of me.” Blake stared into barren space.  
  
“Then I'll tell you. Roj Blake was a zealot fronting a suicidal euphoria of the masses as though it were some kind of jihad. Reprogramming hasn't done much for your sanity. Only Raiker's tactics saved the London. You were going to destroy the computer merely to drag the crew down with us.”  
  
“Bluff, Avon.”  
  
“I'm glad to hear it.”  
  
“Nevertheless, I do believe in dying in active protest. If it comes to a choice between surrender and integrity.”  
  
“Dead is dead, however you go. Nothing is of consequence next to staying alive.”  
  
Blake chuckled at his vehemence. “Never mind, we're fated not to see eye to eye.”  
  
“Will you keep your word to Leylan?”Avon cocked his head curiously. “About behaving yourself?”  
  
“You'll find that out if he gives me a chance to misbehave. I doubt he will, though.”  
  
“No. You should have settled for execution. Now you'll get a submissive and compromised death like everyone else.” Avon gestured with alpha grace. “One of my accomplices succumbed to Security torture.”  
  
“Broke, you mean? Apparently I did that once.”  
  
“I mean expired. Perished. Kicked the bucket. I imagine there is hardly a more sordid was to go. Yet you would call it heroic, because she refused to talk. Unheroically, I survived.”  
  
This was the first personal information the embezzler had offered him. Why intimacy now, Blake wondered, after I nearly dragged him to a firing squad with me? Then again, going down to death together could be as melding as making love together.  
  
“You mustn't punish yourself for that,” said Blake, working on intuition.  
  
Avon stiffened. “I am not the kind to follow her in guilt. You might be irrational enough.”  
  
Finally, Blake was beginning to credit that Avon's stated opinion of him was his true one. “Why did you help me, if you sincerely think me crazy?”  
  
“I think you fey, like all rebels and heroes. Why not, though? You haven't much to live for, I suppose. Since they butchered your family and murdered your past.” Avon studied him objectively.  
  
“A fair bit to kill for,” Blake muttered. “And killing sickens and scares me. But what is there left but fighting for justice?”  
  
“For revenge,” amended Avon.  
  
“I hope not.”  
  
That jutting blade of a nose and the passionate mouth thrust closer. “You were merely their instrument, Blake. These forgers and kidnappers used you. The profit would have been theirs, but when the death sentence was yours, only your wits were around to save you—not your army.”  
  
“The prisoners are welcome to use me, as a planner and risk-taker. They've a right. And it's what I'm good at. All I'm good for, maybe.”  
  
“A kamikaze,” bit Avon. “You want to die a symbolic death.”  
  
“My chosen exit would be in pursuit of freedom, as inspiration to those remaining. Yes. Is there nothing you would die for, Avon?”  
  
“Disgust. I imagine I shall eventually give up out of disgust.”  
  
“You mean contempt of living?”  
  
“I mean disgust.” The fellow glared, as if Blake disgusted him like everything else. Gods, he's had a rough innings, guessed Blake. A privileged alpha waif, and I bet no-one's ever been good to this one except from duty. He dissuades people by reflex. And so disconcertingly intense.  
  
Blake decided he sneered so often to disguise the sadness of his mouth. Furthermore, once that was understood, those awkward features came together into his private kind of beauty. Yes, pessimism was the key to his face. Kerr Avon was, strangely enough, and after his gloomy fashion, captivating.  
  
This porthole encounter had begun, for Blake, with curiosity and a quirky kind of liking. Fifteen minutes later, here he was freefalling in those eerie eyes. He wondered where the London's gravity had gone.  
  
Oblivious to the holocaust happening next to him, Avon said, looking covert, “When I first saw you—fettered in your launch chair for kicking against the traces—I had a premonition.”  
  
“Do you believe in premonitions, Avon?” Blake's words were gusty, because his lungs' rhythm was confused.  
  
“No, therefore I am probably wrong.” He stopped there.  
  
“A premonition about what, Avon? You and I?”  
  
A mistrustful glance. “Something nebulous, General Last-Ditch. But probably gruesome. You must admit I'm right so far.”  
  
“Why, do we have a gruesome relationship?”  
  
“Absolutely.” Avon's lips peeled back from his daunting teeth.  
  
If anyone kissed him those fangs would draw blood, thought Blake, amused. Protectiveness welled tenderly for this granite-hard stranger. He reminded himself, me falling for anyone is a chemical impossibility.  
  
Yet Blake laid a finger on one of those hedgehog shoulders. “Never give up out of disgust, Kerr Avon. You deserve a long life.”  
  
“On Cygnus Alpha?”  
  
“The only excuse for fighting is winning. I lost. Throwing away eight of my friends wantonly. I owe these people another effort. Not on Leylan's territory—I traded your reprieve for that promise, and I'd be superstitious about trampling on my word. Abstract justice might see you fall in the action.”  
  
“You preserved me merely as an accident of preserving yourself and Stannis.”  
  
“Actually, as the computer-wrecker, the officers were least charmed at the prospect of your further company.”  
  
Avon regarded him sourly.  
  
“Subsequent prison ships will come to Cygnus, however, and I mean to hijack one.” Butterflies in his gut, Blake growled evenly, “Will you join me?”  
  
Dark eyes sought to poison him. “In another ludicrous debacle? For what?”  
  
For true love, Blake retorted mentally, because he recognised that the poison was eating Avon too. Then he grinned to see himself—a virgin by mind-erase, going soft on this suffering bastard.  
  
“Tell me the joke,” demanded the bastard. “Or am I the joke?”  
  
“I also have a gruesome premonition,” he told Avon gently. Lured by that handsome face, Blake fancied his soul crept up to expose itself in his own.  
  
Blake, although ignorant, supposed this must be known as being smitten. It was the damnedest thing. Like alchemy, forging an unpromising muddle of metals into gold.  
  
Marching boots roused them from their uneasy stare in the comet-glow. Blake expected a guard and his hackles rose. But it was only their dismissed soldier, who couldn't help walking like one of the enemy. “Here's your friend,” he smiled at Avon.  
  
Travis even clicked his heels when he halted. “Dead of night rendezvous?” He did a droll impression of parade-ground inspection. “There'll be gossip.”  
  
To be civil, Blake returned the pleasantry. “Cold fish like him?”  
  
“And a paedophile like him?” said Avon through smirking teeth. “Implausible on both counts.”  
  
Blake winced, but forgave, knowing this pristine alpha detested the vulgarity of jail.  
  
“Work for you, Father Confessor,” Travis told him. “Paura's in a fit. Woke hallucinating about giant spiders in helmets—I think that fever's corroding his brain. He wants you.”  
  
“Your rabble only adore you the more for failure,” observed Avon. “Contrary to logic.”  
  
“Humans starve on a diet of logic,” Blake said, and parted from this crim who appeared to have embezzled his heart.  
  
The famous Blake, thought Avon in his wake. Indeed he was extraordinary. But that could be either tribute or condemnation.  
  
He'd make no more history on Cygnus Alpha.  
  
“Enrolling you in another terrorist plot?” asked Travis.  
  
Avon turned his attention to the whip-lean, mutilated Space Commander, who, at least, was educated company. Of the other alphas, Blake had artificially-cleared space between his ears, while Stannis had gone rogue as a child and talked like a space tramp. “How did you guess?”  
  
“Never quits, I'll give him that much. Dissent is programmed into his genes. He'd pine away if he didn't have a glorious, impossible right to defend.”  
  
“Glorious? You once called him an anarchist without even enough perspective to realise he's one.”  
  
“Ah, but I'm studying his interpretation of reality. Know thine enemy. Too easy, when your side dumps you among the enemy party.”  
  
“A rejected angel?” suggested Avon in satire, “cast into the devil's camp?”  
  
Travis laughed like the amateur cynic he was. “For fiddling with a cherub.”  
  
“I thought your charge was something to do with massacre of innocents.”  
  
Now the graphic mouth scowled. “My charge was performing my duty. But first I was stripped of rank for unsoldierly behaviour. Which was lucky, if disgrace can ever be lucky. A court martial would have pronounced death, not exile. Being discharged, I underwent a civilian trial, with cushy civilian justice.”  
  
“Unsoldierly behaviour?”  
  
“Messed around with one of my troopers.” His yellow eye sidled to Avon. “Good man. Honourable. Par, his name was.”  
  
“So unlike Blake, you're a true bugger.”  
  
Travis bore his scorn. “Impatient of buggers? I see Blake has you persuaded of his rigged evidence story. He buggered little kids. I picked a tentfellow from the ranks, for the nights of boredom and nerves on campaign.”  
  
“Equally distasteful,” declared Avon blandly.  
  
The soldier changed tack. “Glad you're whole, Kerr. I was resigned to seeing you riddled with laserburn. That's one mark for Blake: he never wastes his people. Dainer, the guard, reckons he did his damnedest to get you pardoned.”  
  
“Blake endangered me in the first place.”  
  
“You ought to have chosen our way. Faking the running log.”  
  
“Evidently.”  
  
“Just you and me, a tight partnership, less to go wrong. I'd handle the crew negotiations, keep them from reneging. Remember I'm their ex-superior officer.”  
  
“Too late. No-one would permit me near the computer again.”  
  
“Why did you prefer Blake's plan?”  
  
“Devil and the deep blue sea.”  
  
“Thanks,” said Travis.  
  
“You, of course, are habituated to mass murder. Anyway, Leylan's another Blake fan. And too tender-hearted to space his cargo.”  
  
“Raiker isn't tender-hearted,” argued Travis. “The money might tempt him to accidentally smash his commander's skull with the tea kettle.”  
  
“Wild plots,” Avon dismissed this.  
  
“I'm wild about survival. Too ruthless for you, Kerr?”  
  
Avon narrowed his eyes. “I am banished from civilization. Blake believes otherwise, but I retain no scruples.”  
  
“Good.” A comradely arm sneaked around his shoulders. “Let's show the bastards how wild they've driven us.”  
  
“Revenge, Sven?”  
  
“Why not? I believed in the service. Gave my arm and eye and sixteen years of dedication. I would have sacrificed my life without complaint, for the service. You never had an allegiance, you wouldn't understand.”  
  
“No. Tell Blake.”  
  
The reaction was a peculiar leer. “I mean to tell our absent-minded Blake everything, when the time is right.”  
  
“He'll be terribly sympathetic.”  
  
“You're not, are you?”  
  
“No.”  
  
The Federation maverick grinned. “Charm the pants off 'em, you do, Kerr. Which reminds me, how'd you like a jack off?”  
  
Travis, on the other hand, talked like a trooper. “I am not the kind for grimy prison capers.”  
  
“Matter of fact, I'm reasonably hygienic. Four months I've bunked above you, and I never hear you jiggling it.”  
  
Avon scowled ferociously. “I don't jiggle anything for your entertainment.”  
  
“Don't you like sex?”  
  
“No,” he hissed.  
  
“You mean fellas?”  
  
“Even less.”  
  
Travis tossed his chin, and his black forelock tumbled loose. “I'm wise to you, Kerr Avon. If I tell anyone, you've the right to remove my tongue with your soup spoon. Soldier's honour.” He saluted, dead seriously. “You know, my bionic hand makes a good vibrator.”  
  
“Or an involuntary anal implant,” he threatened.  
  
“I like you crude. Be a bit crude with me. Unless you're stuck on curly locks and subversive rhetoric? Messiahs excite you?”  
  
“Devil and the deep blue sea,” smiled Avon. And he pushed his tongue into Travis' narrow jaws.  
  
The soldier gurgled a glad laugh into the kiss, and the bone and wire of him insinuated far into Avon's personal space. Blunt, thought Avon, but his arrogance pales next to mine.  
  
“No buggery,” he enunciated. The black patch and prosthetics were—sickly—aphrodisiac. Maimed invisibly himself, he found Travis a kind of metaphor. Screwing his own injuries?  
  
“Hung up, aren't you, Laser Eyes? Thought you retained no scruples?”  
  
“I find this procedure foul and slimy. I agree because I lost my self-respect when I lost everything else.”  
  
“Whatever you say, Kerr.”  
  
A cock like a red, rising cobra with flared neck fascinated Avon. Blood burning—for the body was sordid mechanism—he seized that alien, enticing creature and grinned, “I want to get off.”  
  
What did it matter? Everyone on this travelling prison was dead to the world. The London ferried them across the lightless light years like Charon boating souls over the black river Styx. To the Hades of Cygnus Alpha.  
  
Where there will be wailing and gnashing of teeth, thought Avon, remembering an ancient religious imprecation. And he gnashed as his body ignited in the brightness of coming. Why not get in early?  
  
And Roj Blake? That face swam in the soft-edged vision of his aftermath.  
  
Well, he was aiming to be Lucifer. Messiah of the rebel angels.  
  
#

Blake's naked ribs were half-starved from refusing the tranquillised rations. Suds splotched them as he used elbow-grease on the squalid tiles of the washroom.  
  
“An anti-classist like you oughtn't to mind delta work,” smirked his taskmaster, eating up the sight.  
  
Dark eyes pierced Raiker from under bedraggled curls. “No. I only mind you—sir.”  
  
“Be insolent while you can. Tomorrow I'm rid of your ugly face. But you might miss me, Blake. Heard the tales about how welcome sickos like you are among convicts? The decent society of Cygnus might lynch a man who gets his rocks off with nine-year-olds. Three in a row, Roj. Can't help yourself, can you?”  
  
“Enjoy talking about it, don't you?”  
  
Raiker smiled sleazily. “Finish your penance, Blake.” He strolled out to the prisoners' poker game.  
  
The next visitor was skinny, eye-patched Travis, who urinated then hung around the rebel.  
  
“You and Avon still flogging everyone?” asked Blake affably. They were a dark pair of devils, at cards, as elsewhere.  
  
“Yuh. Play's a bit sullen since Raiker dragged you off. They don't take to misuse of their champion.”  
  
“Well, I'm nobody's champion at poker. Bad at deadpan, Avon says.”  
  
Travis lounged against a cleaned strip of wall. His poses were schizophrenic: when not rigidly at attention, he was in a gelatinous sprawl. Out of the blue, he remarked, “I had a Lazeron Destroyer built into my finger.”  
  
“Did you?” smiled Blake, half amused by his dramatic choice of surgery. Matching his gleaming raven hair, Travis' uniform was a degree darker than Avon's prussian blue—which was how Blake scaled their natures, too.  
  
“Works like this.” Stiffening his metal rod of an arm, the soldier zeroed in on the left half of Blake's face.  
  
A tide heaved through his guts. Death fear, an animal reaction Blake had bottled up for years, believing in ends that transcended mortality. Pledging yourself to the Freedom Party was a signing of your death certificate, which was then held in abeyance, to be eventually fulfilled. Since that time he was, emotionally speaking, a zombie with one foot in the grave. Waiting to fall in. Horrible, but necessary.  
  
Blake wiped on, unashamed about being on his knees. The indignity was Raiker's. “Demonstrate on the subcommander, Travis,” he advised. “He's the foe here.”  
  
“In the Academy we painted faces like yours on targets in the firing range.”  
  
“Like mine?”  
  
“Terrorist faces,” he insisted, as if against argument from Blake, or from himself.  
  
So Blake's denial came gently. “I was never a terrorist. You ought to comprehend that, now you're on the wrong end of that massive gun called the Federation.”  
  
“Hah,” Travis spat.  
  
“Or do you think your persecutors just?”  
  
“Unjust. Because I was condemned for ridding civilization of vermin like you. Rats eating away at order. Why don't you get on your feet when you're threatened, Roj Blake?”  
  
He laughed. “Can't you fire at vermin when he's swabbing latrines?”  
  
That macabre laser-hand jerked down. “No. I'm afraid my trigger circuit was confiscated.”  
  
“Shame,” remarked Blake.  
  
Hostility faded from the single eye. Glancing around, Blake saw the soldier's comrade lurking on the threshold.  
  
Blake rose from his bucket. In the company of this man he would stand, albeit soused in lukewarm soap.  
  
“Service grade duties, Blake?” Casual, Avon wandered in. Avon did nothing casually, unless suspicious, or suspect.  
  
“Raiker has little imagination in humiliations.”  
  
The embezzler began detailing the state of the card game to Travis—Blake's rival for Avon's support in escape proposals. Watching the couple, Blake thought, paranoiacally discreet, Avon is, no-one but me would deduce he's found a fleshly Lethe. Travis, on the other hand, did a slapdash job of dissembling his easy, rough fondness.  
  
After eight months of flight, Kerr Avon's dark nut hair had tendrilled down to threaten one eye. His lean fingers had learnt the habit of tossing away that rich cluster.  
  
No-longer-possible dreams flushed up in Blake again. Luxuriant dreams of plenty, of tangling with Avon bathed in each other's milk and honey. He was arid forever. Yet to batten on another's iron-hard, tender-skinned, crisp-ridged—  
  
Blake throttled the fantasy. Chemicals were no match for love, he noted in grim triumph.  
  
The corner of Avon's eye signalled him. While Blake worked on figuring out the message, Avon manoeuvred his sidekick in unethical poker back to the game. Travis was chased urbanely away with instructions for their next hand.  
  
So, he wishes to be alone with me? smiled Blake to himself. In fact, Avon came to perch on the conference centre of Blake's bunk as often as anyone else did. The difference was, Avon had ever a whiplash of an excuse.  
  
Out the porthole a pitted turquoise ball glowed. Waiting for them, as the London navigated with care deeper into the star system of Cygnus. Raiker was right—the penal colony was an unknown quantity. Just now Blake was savouring what were, if he were unlucky, his last hours with Kerr Avon.  
  
“I wonder what faces us tomorrow,” he remarked.  
  
“Thugs and barbarians,” shrugged Avon, as if stating the obvious.  
  
“No need to be so pessimistic about the company we'll be keeping. Look at this shipment. I was framed. Vila never had a chance. Gan only avenged his wife. That unfortunate Paura only agitated for Silmarino's independence. Downtrodden, Avon, each of them. Hitting back became a necessity.”  
  
“And me?” the larcenist asked sardonically. “Was I pushed into anti-social behaviour?”  
  
Blake chuckled. He had his theories about Avon, too, but thought more than a hint would be impertinent at this early stage. Eight months they'd rubbed shoulders, but with Kerr Avon, that was a short acquaintance. Even when you loved him. Blake's prayer was that he'd be given years on Cygnus Alpha to fashion Avon into the only thing possible, a friend. “You? You chose crime. But then you were never happy.”  
  
Avon's eyes bored into him, intrigued and not disguising the fact. “Was I not?”  
  
“And,” resumed Blake, “we can depend on each other, at least, down there.”  
  
“Whom in particular are you referring to?”  
  
The ex-insurgent dared a promise. “You and me.”  
  
Avon's tone crisped. “If civilization will not be a survival characteristic, Blake, altruism will be a survival liability. Personally, I will do anything I must to avoid death. That was always my one philosophy.”  
  
Yes, and here it resembled a warning. Blake didn't comment, but he consoled himself with the knowledge that Avon had followed him in their revolt four months ago, not the blood-happy Travis.  
  
“And what business did our trooper have with you?” Avon asked, gesturing back to the door.  
  
“Travis?” His eyes crinkled up. “Nothing much. Just adjusting to his situation.”  
  
“I would be wary of him if I were you, Blake.”  
  
“Why? What quarrel has he with me?”  
  
“Don't dedicated officers generally have a quarrel with political criminals and child molesters? To me, Travis opines you're both.”  
  
Blake shrugged. “I think he wouldn't come and chat to me about it so much, if he didn't have doubts about me being a bogey.”  
  
“He advocates capital punishment for revolutionaries,” stressed Avon. “What if he decides to render one last service to the Federation, in his misguided loyalty?”  
  
“Misguided, Avon? I must be subverting you.”  
  
The handsome face shuttered. “Any loyalty is misguided.”  
  
Blake smiled. “The fellow isn't patrolling Outside for enemies of the state any more. His reflex to arrest will pass once he deals with dismissal.”  
  
Of course, Blake was envious as hell, but kept that from souring into jealousy. No point. Anyway, Kerr was only having a fling. “He's not so bad, your friend.” Chewing his lip, Blake added, “Ill-educated, though.”  
  
“Meaning he's not on your side.”  
  
“Something like that,” he smiled again.  
  
“To tell the truth, I don't have unbounded faith in Travis' sanity. He's one third crazy, at least. And he has a hang-up about you.”  
  
“So you came you to caution me. I appreciate the attention.” His warm, slightly jesting eyes lingered on Avon.  
  
Who scowled uneasily. “A warning didn't cost me anything. And you have betters ways of dying, you told me.”  
  
“True enough. You haven't talked him out of it, then? Me being a rapist, and that?”  
  
“Perhaps,” and those eyes gleamed wickedly, “I agree with him.”  
  
“Eh, you!” a rough interruption came. Raiker was bearing down on them, face unsightly with festering resentment. Blake knew he had a court inquiry coming up after this voyage—Leylan had promised. “Chat to the worker, will you, you smartarse crimo trash? Who told you you could do that?”  
  
Avon turned to meet him, looking stultified with boredom.  
  
The subcommander struck him. An off-handedly nasty slash across the cheek.  
  
Kerr had been standing near to him, as near as if he too had secret wishes, and Blake was fanned by the swinging arm. Expression going black, he launched himself.  
  
This time there were no guards to intrude between him and his target. Blake could have seized the mop from the bucket, but settled for bare hands. He rammed Raiker into the tiles, once, twice, and three times.  
  
He thought, too, of the officer's blaster. But no, Blake only wanted to brawl.  
  
Raiker didn't share his enthusiasm for the pastime. Fumbling for the weapon, he managed to yank it out between encounters with the wall. Timing his counterattack cunningly, he gunwhipped Blake's temple.  
  
The rebel allowed the crack of ridged metal to stumble him back. Better ways of dying, he repeated to himself. And two reasons to live. His mission to liberate the prisoners, and—  
  
The other mission, to create a true smile on Kerr Avon's bleak face.  
  
So he gave Raiker an even stare of contempt, blood damp in one eyebrow.  
  
“You look good, battered,” Raiker said. “Suits you.”  
  
“The blaster suits you, sir.”  
  
“You're lucky, Roj. I'm going to leave you to the vultures of Cygnus. They'll probably snip your dick off before they chill you.” He walked arrogantly out of harm's way.  
  
Your people already did that, Blake answered bitterly, but in private.  
  
Avon hissed, “You handed him a fine excuse to shoot you, Blake.”  
  
“Too cowed by Leylan. Raiker wants a career left.” The engineer wiped heedlessly at his laceration.  
  
“I didn't ask you to avenge me, Blake, and if you thought I would assist and get executed on our last day, you don't know me.”  
  
“I'm getting to know you, Avon,” he half-laughed, patient. “Don't worry, I was spoiling for a go at him before planetfall.”  
  
That settled, the embezzler came near again and studied Blake's brow. Miraculously, he produced a pristine cambric handkerchief.  
  
Blake opened his hand for it, but Avon wanted to spoil his own handkerchief. He dabbed neatly, criticising in the meantime, “You're trouble, Blake. You lap up punishment, don't you?”  
  
“Hurts them worse than it hurts me.”  
  
“Oh? Well, you did knock him around quite decisively. He wasn't eager to face you in a fair fight.”  
  
“Hmm. But I meant morally.”  
  
“Don't think I'm proud of your spirit. Any intelligent individual would steer clear of you.”  
  
So why are you about four inches from me? wondered Blake, watching his soft, rich underlip, thrust slightly in moodiness. Should he kiss Kerr, confess everything?  
  
Avon glanced down from the clogging blood, to his eyes. Devil knew how much tenderness was written there, but Avon didn't shy away. He just cocked one fine eyebrow.  
  
And muttered, “Devil and the deep blue sea.”  
  
“Eh?” Blake was lost in enchantment.  
  
“You don't have a poker face at all, General Last-Ditch.”  
  
“Guess not.”  
  
“I won't be doing this again, Blake. Not under the circumstances.”  
  
“Doing what—Kerr?”  
  
Avon surveyed the door. Then he kissed Blake.  
  
More in sadness than in passion. His musk mouth yielded against Blake's, slow and sensual and steeped in regret. Hands gripped Blake's soiled bare waist insistently, though the kiss remained shallow. His eyes were tilted down, and Blake read melancholy there.  
  
Sympathy and adoration washed the engineer. Ah, love, if I could save you, save us and give the years I have to you—  
  
The kiss ended, leaving Blake's mouth moist and yearning.  
  
“I've fallen for you,” he spoke the truth, throat rough.  
  
Across Kerr's face ran a come-hither look, dark and enigmatic, like a dare. “Not wise, Roj Blake.”  
  
“Can't help myself.” Blake was trembling—from joy, he thought. He was glad Raiker hadn't killed him.  
  
“Eros, and Thanatos,” remarked the alpha, learnedly. “I wonder which you have more of, Roj?”  
  
“And you, my gloomy one?”  
  
“Neither.” Tightening, Avon pulled away. “There's nothing of you in me. I was merely curious.” He left the washroom with a last peculiar, driven glance.  
  
Faith in the future glowed through the remaining man. His blanked memory no longer mocked him—Avon was there, an overpowering presence in the empty space. Avon, mysterious and sullen and proud and as sweet to have as liberty. If only he could compensate Kerr for the things that had happened to him. If only he had the capacity to burn from his body the ghost of his dead accomplice.  
  
Impossible, his brain told him. Everything was rationally impossible. He would fight on, regardless. In the computer room, Avon had said he wanted to be free. And how he deserved to be.  
  
Give him that, or die trying, vowed Blake, abandoning his half-finished cleaning.  
  
The prisoners, burying their depression in boisterous cards, looked up as he returned. Each face told Blake they remembered his inspirational talk, his sketches of a loosely defined hope.  
  
“Here, General, take my seat,” offered that old reprobate Selman, eagerly.  
  
##  
#


End file.
